Dropping Experts, Recombining Neurons: Retraining-Free Pruning for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts LLMs
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are widely used in large language models (LLMs) due to their computational efficiency. However, though only a few experts are activated for each token, SMoE still requires loading all expert parameters, leading to high memory usage and challenges in dep